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Tag or don't tag???

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Hayguy

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Big Swede mentioned that he no longer tag's, just wondering the reasoning behind this and if any one else is following suit.

So do you tag and why and if you don't why not??
 
I tag my purebeds and the Hfrs calving in the corral just to help the mothering up issues and we do move a few pair to smaller pastures. The main herd calves in the hills and is impossible to tag safely and I don't have enough manpower to do it.
 
we tag here for ID purposes with the cow, and also a quick look if calf or cow is not where they should be if it is mine, also when they go to market it helps as the brand men found one in with neighbors, because of the tag they pulled and clipped for brand and got him back. So lot of different reasons to tag
 
tag, the help can look for a cow tag number easier then look for a tight bag or dry cow....
ear notch on twin ewe lambs, keeping twin ewe lamb will increase lambing rate over those big singles
 
I do- mainly because of keeping the purebred calves straight- and for sorting/mothering when moving to different pastures...

I use the Z-tags and after the free offer on here that allowed me to have ranch name stenciled on them- I've kept ordering them that way... And this year it paid off to the tune of $1000+.... When I gathered one pasture in Oct. I was missing a calf from it.. About the 1st of the year I get a call from a family that runs in a pasture near mine who had just gathered their calves and were working them- and had spotted the eartag with the name on it...
Hopefully it would have been spotted by a Brand Inspector if it hadn't had the tag- but with them all haired up like they were the tag is just second pretty cheap insurance...
 
Tags cost money and time, but they are a very effective way to keep track of lots of useful information. It is an investment that has many more benefits than drawbacks, at least on our ranch.
 
Everything gets tagged,i sort for 4 different pastures so i want to make sure the right cattle are paired the first time.I want the heifers off my best cows,not looking for just replacements.If something happens to the cow or calf,i want to know now who the other part of the pair is not wait for one of them to start bawling.If the neighbours or vise versa cattle get mixed up in the pasture,pretty easy to sort them back up if they are the same colour of cattle.I cull my cows for there disposition,so if i can't tag there calf in the barn or the pasture with the cow,to town they go!
 
No tagging at birth anymore. Way too many close calls with over protective mothers. Not worth myself or dad getting hurt any longer.
 
I have the luxury of being able to move mom and calf to the loafing shed - - - divide them into separate pens, tag and move to the pasture with the other cows that have already calved.

Tags have recovered several animals that " wandered" and would have been lost with out them.

I feel part of good management is good records and tagging is part of that process.
 
Soapweed said:
Tags cost money and time, but they are a very effective way to keep track of lots of useful information. It is an investment that has many more benefits than drawbacks, at least on our ranch.
Click to expand...

same here
 
There are a lot of good reasons to tag........I would think if it can't be done safely,It's not worth getting hospitalized,crippled or killed over.....just saying..
 
Where my cows calve now it's rough country, full of big hills, draws, pines, washouts, rocks.....you get the picture. I tried it the first year but it was taking about 2 hours a day and by the time I was done the whole herd was agitated and moving. I was the predator out there. I finally decided that I was doing more harm than good. If a cow fails at motherhood she is dry at branding time and gets sold. Over time I think that strategy will ensure better mothering abilities. Just my theory though.

I do still calve the heifers at home a little earlier in a lot and tag just like the old days so when there's a storm I can keep them straight.
 
I think you are definitely seeing more calves sold without tags and for exactly the reasons Big Swede has given. Some tag at branding and you can pair a lot of them up by turning a few out at a time or keeping a notebook with you over the summer or holding the calves off the cows for awhile at preconditioning.

Woke up this morning to snow blowing sideways and immediately had visions of cows and calves bunched in fence corners. Used to have that problem a lot when we dry lot calved. Every time a storm came through we'd put them in a corral behind windbreaks. Like people who have everything done for them they didn't know how to take care of themselves. Since we started pasture calving later, when the weather gets bad I feed in the trees and brush and the cows have gotten used to being there and will stay there in the worst storms.
 
I think that there are as many good reasons not to tag as there are to tag. I think that it is very helpful in first calf hfrs and obviously in a purebred herd where parental data is essential. One ranch we worked for didn't tag any mature cow's calves. We culled any drys in the spring and sorted dink calves off in the fall at weaning and turned back out and gathered the pairs once they were together. That made it easy to cull the cows that weren't getting it done. Tagging takes a lot of time if you are not lot calving and pairing out. I think that not tagging improves your knowledge of your cows. Most people in this part of the world tag. I work with people that literally can't tell if a cow and calf are a pair unless they are tagged. I prefer not to tag myself, I don't carry a book and numbers mean very little to me I usually transpose them anyway but I can point a problem out to you without a number. My wife kept a book and wrote down a quick description of the cow and calf as she rode through heavies everyday. That next fall she could tell you what calves belonged to which cows on the majority of the herd.
 
This is interesting. We have some new purebreds that we tagged and weighed at birth. We don't tag any commercial calves at birth. Calving out on grass, we would be lucky to get things tagged in 2 hours per day. We tag everything at branding with a floppy and a CCIA electronic tag. I can mother them up off the horse, etc.
We DNA all of our replacement heifers and know for sure who mom and dad are.
We tag heifers through the chute with a steel tag when we AI them the first time (in case they lose their tags).
In the past we have branded a year on the shoulder of a heifer, but this year we put their whole tag number on their ribs.
I agree that you can sort out the dinks pretty easily, but it better family peacekeeping if you have a group of a couple hundred black cows when you can talk about a problem and refer to a number, rather than "that black cow, you know, the black one from the other day". :lol:
 
Obviously, the 'dif'rent srokes for dif'rent folks' applies to tagging calves as well as other things in life!

We each own our cows on this ranch, with our own brands. We calve (other than the hiefers this year) 'outside' in fair size, rough pastures, and calves are tagged soon as they are found, for the most part. With a crewof four or five, people and depending on what other work is happening, there can be more than one person riding through them to handle the snuffy cows. We also are culling more of those kind! We will end up with lots of information for us, and for future owners on those tags, accessible by computer, which we are finding worth the time and cost at this point in time. We also will have them in several pastures after branding, some quite a distance from 'home', so see benefits there in easy visibility of the tags. Nothing is written in concrete, though.

mrj

mrj
 
A friend and I had a conversation about this the other day. He tags but his dad does not. They run their cows seperately. He said it sure is nice to have tag numbers when you have problems. He is right, my argument was that for the amount of problems we have it probably is justified not to tag in financial savings. If you were to add up the number of hours it takes to tag and the cost of the tags, then compare that to the number of hours spent trying to fix the problems during calving, I am positive that financially it is much less expensive to tag. As far as pairing out, I am not sure that it is a big advantage either. I helped a rancher pair about 650 hd up, everything is tagged to match and we still had a couple of screw ups. I have helped other ranches that don't tag pair out in the corner of a pasture and been able to do it very efficiently with no obvious mistakes ( not cows or calves looking for a mate later). I think you just have to do what fits your outfit.
 

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